Target

She climbed into her sporty German coupe and backed out of the driveway. She steered down the winding, tree-lined streets of Bethesda, Maryland southward toward Alexandria, Virginia and its Old Town neighborhood where Oracle made its home.

Rock Creek Parkway and the gorgeous park it wound through was deserted at this time of morning with only a few delivery trucks and graveyard shifters on the road. And that was probably why she spotted the piece-of-shit sedan tailing her about a quarter-mile back. She’d lay odds it was Army Intel. The driver’s movements were so precisely according to the Army training manual that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else back there. Besides, no self-respecting FBI agent would be caught dead in a gutless heap like that. And surely the intruder from her house wasn’t so brash that he’d follow her this soon after his getaway. He’d been worried about getting caught. No way would he expose himself openly again. Especially if her hunch about his identity was correct.

She could weed out anybody else by process of elimination. She had no other major investigations open. Every thug she’d helped catch in recent memory was safely behind bars. The other conspiracy theories she was developing at the moment involved political or economic forces that had no human face. But, she’d spent the last three months on the Internet day and night, slowly worming herself inside a terrorist organization known as the Q-Rajn, or Q-group. After that bunch had nearly killed her Athena Academy classmate and NSA code-breaker pal, Kim Valenti, she’d been put on the trail of the Q-group as well. Kim had cracked a code the terrorists were using and foiled a suicide bombing the group was planning in Chicago, but was nearly killed herself in the process. Immediately after the incident, Delphi had assigned Diana to take over the hunt for Q-group and search for any possible reason the terrorists might want to kill Gabe Monihan. Personally, she thought the link between the Q-group and Monihan was tenuous at best. Until tonight. Now, all bets were off. And despite recent busts of local Q-group headquarters in several states, they were still capable of mounting a break-in at her house. And they were certainly capable of trying to kill the President-elect of the United States.

The Q-group was comprised of ex-patriot citizens of a tiny country called Berzhaan, which made up for its small size by brewing bucketloads of international political upheaval. The Q-group was devoted to overthrowing the current regime in its homeland. Historically, they operated only on Berzhaani soil. But all that had changed last October, when they’d taken over a Chicago news station as a diversion and then attempted to set off a bomb at Chicago O’Hare, one of the busiest and highest profile airports in the world. The Q-group had claimed that the attack was an effort to stop U.S. aid to rebels in Berzhaan who wanted to overthrow the country. But she’d never bought that explanation. Why wouldn’t these guys just protest on the steps of the United Nations or hold press conferences demanding a change in U.S. foreign policy? No, they’d had some other goal in mind.

And that’s what she’d been trying to pinpoint for the last couple of months. She’d found a chat room on the Internet where she believed these guys reported to their superiors, received instructions and obtained the money and resources for their activities. Of course, an elaborate series of code words and phrases was employed, so a perfectly innocuous chat about World Cup Soccer scores or a visit with family members might actually be a discussion of which target had been chosen for their next attack. But gradually, she’d been able to identify different combinations of meaning until the hidden subtext of the chats was becoming clear to her.

In fact, she’d turned her attention to ferreting out the real identities of the terrorists in the last few days. It was painstaking work, tracing the electronic transmissions backward through layers of Internet servers to their points of origin. But, once she nailed down the home server for each terrorist, she’d be able to approach that server’s operator with a warrant and obtain the actual customer account information, complete with names, addresses and credit card numbers. Given another couple of weeks, she ought to be able to name everyone in the Q-group’s American network.

Except, if Delphi was right, she didn’t have that long.

Her gut instincts screamed that the Q-group was not only behind the break-in at her house, but also any attack that might be imminent against President-to-be Gabe Monihan.

She rolled down Massachusetts Avenue and its stately rows of foreign embassies, and took surface streets toward Route 1, which ran south past the Pentagon and down into Alexandria, passing through the Old Town section of that Virginia suburb. She watched her rearview mirror carefully as she turned onto the wide semihighway. Yup, the sedan behind her made the turnoff. Damn. She couldn’t lead anyone to Oracle’s doorstep! Not the Q-group, and definitely not the Army. Oracle existed outside of the government, outside of private enterprise, outside of any system, in fact. It was a force unto itself and needed to stay that way, buried deep where nobody but a select few even knew of its existence.

The good news was she had a fast and maneuverable car and her followers did not. She approached a major intersection in the multilane road and turned off it at the very last second, crossing a couple of lanes of traffic at high speed to do so. The street was deserted so the maneuver wasn’t dangerous per se, but it was darned hard to miss. If her tail was going to stay with her, he’d have to pull a similar stunt and point himself out to her in spectacular fashion. The Army training manual on a one-car pursuit said he’d go ahead and make that highly visible turn if it was more important not to lose the quarry than to be stealthy. In her experience, Army Intel wasn’t too hung up on stealth and generally adhered to the brute-force theory of doing business.

Her car held the sharp swerve of the turnoff beautifully. The tail didn’t follow her. Which meant one of two things. Either he had a partner vehicle she hadn’t spotted and had handed off the pursuit, or he had some other means of tracking her. And as soon as the second option occurred to her, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was correct.

Change of plans. She caught a red light, so she turned right on red and sped away from the next intersection. She proceeded several blocks into the tall office buildings of Fairfax, Virginia. City ordinances in Washington, D.C., prevented any buildings from being taller than the U.S. Capitol’s dome or the various monuments that defined the D.C. skyline. So, the necessary vertical sprawl of a major city had spilled over to this side of the Potomac. She drove until a stoplight was kind to her and turned yellow just ahead of her. She punched the accelerator and shot through the light as it turned red. She made a couple more quick turns, reversing direction and heading back west toward the Potomac River that dissected the metropolitan area in half, north to south. If a tail was still back there, the guy was better than she was.

She pointed her car toward the Beltway, the eight-lane highway that ringed Washington and its environs. Somewhere along its perimeter, she’d no doubt find a truck stop.

Why in the world was the Army following her? There’d been rumors for years that she was on her way over the edge to la-la land. Yeah, she’d made a couple of bad calls the last few months. Or more accurately, the Oracle database had made a couple of colossally bad calls. The kind that embarrassed the Army big-time when, one after another, the theories were proven wrong. She’d been eating a steady diet of crow for about the last three months. But that still didn’t explain why the Army was following her now. The only reasonable explanation she could think of was that her bosses had finally had enough of her. Maybe they were building a file of documentation to use to pull the plug on her!

Right. And now who sounded paranoid and delusional? She needed a vacation. Bad. Or maybe a new job.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t breeze into her boss’s office and resign her commission just like that. It was a lengthy process that could take months or be denied altogether, especially in a critically undermanned field like hers. Which was to say only a handful of other people in the Army did what she did, and Uncle Sam wasn’t about to let any of them go.

The traditional intel community valued slow and steady legwork. Gradual, careful case building. Unassailable logic. Hard evidence. But she was a maverick. She speculated on the unknown. She guessed, for God’s sake. The brass couldn’t abide her style of doing business. It wasn’t that she objected to traditional intelligence collection. She just believed both methods of thought were necessary to build a balanced picture of threats in the world. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising after all that someone in the Army saw fit to keep close tabs on her.

She pulled into a sprawling truck stop and got out of her car. She knelt down and peered underneath the back end of her car. Nothing. Okay, maybe she really was losing her mind. She moved around to the front and laid down on the cold ground to peer underneath her car’s front axle. And saw it. A round, metallic disk about the size of her palm. Shiny in contrast to the vehicle’s black metal frame. The bastards had put a tracking device on her car. She pulled a screwdriver out of the tool kit in her trunk and pried the radio transmitter off the bottom of her car, then strolled past a semi with California license plates, unobtrusively popping the magnetic locator beacon onto the underside of its front bumper as she walked by. There. That should keep the Army busy for a while. Cheerfully whistling Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie,” she made her way back to her car.

She took a circuitous route through Old Town, passing the pub where George Washington used to go to hoist an ale and the shop where Paul Revere’s silver had been sold when it was new. And, of course, the ice-cream shop that made the best hot fudge sundaes this side of the Potomac. She turned down a tree-lined residential street of narrow town houses, dating back some two-hundred-fifty years. After one last check in her rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind her, she turned into a driveway beside one of the historic homes. A tall, iron security gate swung open silently. Only one Oracle agent at any given time was allowed into the town house that acted as their headquarters. Agents were required to park behind the house. Had another agent already been inside, the gate would not have opened and she’d have had to come back later. Delphi was nothing if not fanatical about secrecy.

She parked her car and hurried up the steps to the back door. A simple key lock got her inside the enclosed porch. But then the real security measures started. A retinal scanner checked her eyeball with a tiny red beam of light. Next, she entered a security code into a number pad and swiped one of her normal-looking credit cards with its secretly embedded computer chip. Last, she announced her name and password sentence to a state-of-the-art voice recognition system. And finally, a heavy steel door disguised as a regular porch door unlocked, granting her access to the interior of the house.

She stepped inside, moving quickly past the kitchen and down a narrow hallway toward the front of the house. Tonight she needed the full Oracle database. And that was housed in the library.

She stepped into a large room that dominated the entire front half of this floor. It was lined to the ceiling with shelves crammed with books on every subject under the sun. She’d love to just sit in here for a year or so and do nothing but read. Stripping off her duster, she dropped it into the nearest chair and moved to the desk at one side of the room. An innocuous-looking computer monitor and keyboard stood on top of it. And in fact, it was innocuous. This system was purely for controlling access to the actual Oracle mainframe. In and of itself, it had no real functionality.

She booted up the computer and entered the triple passwords required to get into its operating system. Then, she placed her hand flat on the system’s perfectly normal-looking mouse pad, which proceeded to light up and scan her palm print. The computer screen announced that she was, indeed, Diana Lockworth. A quiet swish on the other side of the room heralded the slow glide of a pair of bookcases as they slid backward on hidden tracks and then moved to the side behind the other bookshelves. A computer terminal and a half-dozen monitors lined the secret alcove. The Oracle mainframe.

Diana moved over to the hidden computer terminal and logged on. She typed in the reference number of the threat analysis Delphi had sent her and, in the blink of an eye, the computer displayed the full text of the report on the center monitor. She read it quickly.

Oracle had made a careful analysis of the tactics used by the Q-group in its Chicago attack and determined that the plan had to have been developed by…holy cow!

She blinked in disbelief. The CIA? No way. That bunch would never stage a terrorist attack against Americans, and certainly not on their home turf.

Except this was one of the great strengths of Oracle. It was dispassionate. It ignored the beliefs and value judgments that humans injected into their analyses and it looked purely at facts. Of course, the flip side of that coin was the intuition and leaps of logic the human mind could make that Oracle could not. Reluctantly, she conceded the point to the computer. Technically it was possible that the CIA had trained the Q-group terrorists. The idea made her gut clench, but she read on.

The Q-group attack closely matched a training scenario the CIA had developed more than a decade ago that had proven to be highly effective and difficult to neutralize. Oracle was 97.4 percent certain that this very scenario was the basis for the Q-group’s tactical plan in Chicago. Lovely. She read on grimly.

Furthermore, the original CIA scenario was not aimed at taking over an airport or large public space. It was designed to assassinate an individual, specifically a political figure protected by a team of highly trained bodyguards along the lines of a Secret Service detail. An extravagant explosion with maximum loss of life was used to cover up the true target of the attack.

Like Gabe Monihan. No wonder Oracle thought he was going to be killed! She continued reading, her jaw tight. If, in fact, the Q-group’s mission in Chicago had been to kill Monihan and not to protest U.S. involvement in Berzhaan, which was almost a certainty according to Oracle, they were 89.9 percent likely to try again within a year. The Q-group was extremely motivated by patriotism and zealotry, and Oracle noted that such people rarely gave up if a first attempt at a goal that furthered their cause failed.

She scrolled down to the next page. And jumped as a sound intruded upon her concentration. She frowned. Nobody else should be here if she was in the building. The noise came again. It sounded like something hitting the front door. Was someone knocking on it? Who in the world would be at the door at this hour? A nosy neighbor? The Army? The CIA? Q-group?

She stood up to check it out. Then leaped for the library door as a massive sound of rending wood came from the vicinity of the front hallway. She looked out and saw splinters of wood lying on the floor, and great cracks splitting the wood trim around the door.

Ohmigod. Somebody was forcing his way into the building!

She raced for the desk and smacked the button on the access computer that closed the book panels, then jumped for the library door again. A ponderous swishing noise began behind her. Hurry, hurry! she begged the panels. She should’ve brought her service pistol with her. But who’d have guessed there’d be a break-in here of all places? She slammed the library door shut and locked it as a great tearing sound on the hallway side of it announced the failure of the front doorjamb.

Someone tried the doorknob at her hip.

“Over here,” a male voice called out.

She checked behind her. The panels were about halfway closed. She threw her shoulder against the wood door to bolster it against whatever assault was about to come. She gasped as a sharp object burst through the wood beside her head. An ax! That answered how they’d gotten inside the front door so easily. Brute force, indeed. A second ax blow thumped through the door near the doorknob. This interior door wasn’t made to withstand an assault like this. It would splinter into matchsticks in a matter of seconds.

She certainly didn’t need to get a finger cut off or her head cleaved in two in a fruitless attempt to hold the door together. She backed away from the door as axes chewed through it like cardboard. The secret panels began their ponderous slide forward into place. She looked around frantically for a weapon. Nothing. She tipped over a delicate Queen Anne chair and stomped on it, breaking off a leg and scooping it up in her hand. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

An arm reached through a jagged hole in the wood for the lock, and she jumped forward, bashing it with her makeshift club. A howl of pain and the hand withdrew. Diana jumped as she heard three sharp spits in quick succession. Crud. A silenced pistol.

The bookshelves behind her shut with a soft pop. And the hallway door exploded inward.

She backed away from the entrance quickly, her hands heading skyward, as four masked men burst into the room. She dropped the chair leg and, hands on top of her head, announced immediately, “I’m unarmed.”

She stood motionless as two of the men headed for the computer at the desk and the other two rushed over to her. They grabbed her arms and yanked them behind her back, slapping on a plastic restraint and pulling it painfully tight around her wrists. She stood passively as one of the men frisked her roughly and thoroughly. But she did flinch when one of the men across the room pulled out the computer’s component tower from its cabinet inside the desk and took out a baseball bat. He swung violently at the computer. Pieces of plastic flew everywhere. Another swing and the tower split open. A third swing and pieces of circuit board and wire went flying. A swift yank and he pulled the entire hard drive free of its mooring.

He grunted, “Got it. Let’s go.”

A voice snarled in her ear, “Back off, bitch.”

And then something hard and heavy smashed into the back of her head.

5:00 A.M.

Something scratchy rubbed her cheek. She moved her head slightly and groaned as pain throbbed outward from a point at the back of her skull. Man, that hurt. She sat up carefully. Her wrists were tied together behind her back. It felt like a set of plastic handcuffs.

Dang, her head throbbed something fierce. How long had she been out? She looked at the mantel clock at the far end of the room. Ten minutes, maybe. Oh, Lord. Oracle! She whipped her head around to check the bookshelves. Piercing pain shot down her neck. Oww. The panels that hid the Oracle mainframe were still intact. Thank God.

The first order of business was to get her hands free. She climbed awkwardly to her feet, a bit of a trick with her hands tied behind her back. Cautiously, she stepped into the hall. The entire front door frame hung askew, the wood and metal ripped out of the walls. She headed for the kitchen, praying it actually contained some kitchen implements, like, oh, knives.

She found what she needed in a drawer beside the sink. Turning to face away from the drawer, she fished around with her fingers until she grasped the handle of a paring knife. It took some maneuvering, but she worked the blade between her wrists and sawed at the tough plastic until it burst free. She rubbed the circulation back into her hands and hugged herself to stretch her aching shoulder muscles. First order of business: clear the building and make sure the intruders were gone.

Scooping up the biggest butcher knife in the drawer, she ran upstairs and checked the conference room and equipment lockers that took up most of the second floor. She’d never been to the third floor, but she went up there and cleared the plush offices and single, small bedroom that turned out to be housed there. Empty. And interestingly enough, the computer workstations in them were undisturbed. The intruders had specifically targeted the computer in the ground-floor library. Had the Oracle Agency been breached? Its security broken? How else could anyone have such specific targeting information on where Oracle could be found?

She sat down at the desk in the largest office, facing the street. The phone still worked. She dialed the emergency number she’d memorized years ago but had never had occasion to use. Until now. The direct contact number for Delphi. Her curiosity to hear the voice of her employer almost overrode her urgency to report the break-in. The phone rang once. A second time. And then the receiver clicked.

An answering machine intoned a standard “leave your name and phone number at the beep” message. The female voice sounded like the same one the phone company used to announce its various automated messages. Drat. No help at all in learning more about Delphi.

She left a quick message describing the break-in and declared her intention to stay here and guard Oracle until help arrived. She hung up, staring at the dark, blank computer screen before her. Who were those four men? They were all tall, fit and strong. Efficient. Focused tightly on their mission. Pros for sure. She closed her eyes and replayed the break-in again in her head, allowing the tiny details to flow past her mind’s eye. These men were distinctly different from the guy who’d broken into her apartment. She compared the two attacks. The man at her house had been slighter of build. Trained in classical martial arts. He’d relied on speed and skill rather than sheer brawn.

And then her memory registered something new about his masked face. The skin around his eyes had been nut-brown. Not Caucasian. But the men in the library, at least the two who jumped her, showed glimpses of fair skin. One of the men had pale blue eyes. Caucasians for sure. She’d been certain the first attack at her home was the Q-group. But this second attack? It didn’t have any of the hallmarks of having been executed by the same people. Then who in the world were the second intruders?

A snippet from the Monihan report popped into her head. The Q-group bombing had mimicked a CIA exercise. Was it possible? Had a group of CIA agents just broken into Oracle’s headquarters? An ex-CIA agent had been in Berzhaan a year or two back, making deals with some Q-group rebels. He’d been caught working with a Q-group cell in Baltimore just after the Chicago O’Hare incident. In fact, Kim Valenti had been part of the raid resulting in his capture. What was his name?

She turned on the computer in front of her, accessed the Internet and typed the access codes for Oracle. Nada. It was locked down tighter than a drum. The destruction of the access computer in the library must have triggered some sort of alarm. She turned off the computer on the desk in front of her and headed downstairs, back into the library. The access computer in there was a shambles. She went over to the mouse pad and tried to activate the secret panels. Nothing. There had to be some other method to get to the Oracle terminal. But darned if she knew what it was.

She needed the identity of the American agent who’d worked with the Q-group, but it was at home, along with her cell phone with Kim Valenti’s phone numbers in it.

As she waited for someone to show up to guard Oracle or at least fix the front door, something else came back to her. One of the men said something to her right before he knocked her out. She frowned and tried to remember the growled threat. He told her to back off. In a distinctly American accented voice. Since the Q-group was comprised entirely of Berzhaani natives, that pretty much ruled out the Q-group as the second set of attackers.